Every Drink Starts Before Service

When you hear the word bartender, most people don't really understand it as a job title. Some envy it and say you're living the life, drinking and partying every day. Others, my parents included, question whether it's a career worth stepping into at all. Most bartenders in the past faced that tension and some still do today. It's easier to justify now that more people see what bartenders actually do. But the confusion starts because most people never see how a drink is actually built in a bar.

What arrives in the glass is the final step. The back bar, the prep list, suppliers and cost controls have already defined what's possible before service even begins. Creativity happens within those limits, not outside them. For most bars today, especially those working within tight costing, it really comes down to the cent. I learned that early, having started off in a resort bar. Back then I thought bartending was hard. Then I moved to PS150 on Petaling Street, and I realised I was wrong. Hundreds of spirits, detailed cocktail recipes to learn from, and drink after drink, every single night. My perspective changed again when I joined Pernod Ricard as a white spirits brand ambassador.

Across all those years, one thing stayed the same. Every drink I made started from ingredients I already understood. Into The Wild Club: Liquid Basecamp in Bali was the first time that foundation was taken away.

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Into The Wild Club: Liquid Basecamp

Over the weekend, seven bartenders from across Asia gathered in Bali, from Between the Sips, Fat Cat, Pony Up, Backdoor Bodega, Night Rooster, Infinity and Beyond and Locavore NXT. Hosted by The Night Rooster and developed with Locavore NXT, the programme was built around exploration and experimentation, moving between foraging, exchange and creation. As someone covering it for media, I was interested in the drinks, but what stood out more was how quickly familiar bartending language started to break down once the environment changed.

The first part of the weekend took place in Singa Perang Village and the surrounding areas with the Locavore NXT team. Ingredients weren't presented the way you normally see them through suppliers or markets. They were in their natural environment. Coffee, passionfruit and wild herbs were all growing, without being arranged into anything that suggested how they should eventually be used.

In hospitality, we usually only see ingredients after that first decision has been made: harvested, selected, packaged. Here, that step was removed.

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The Leaf That Tastes Like Mango

Then someone handed me a cem cem leaf. It looks like nothing, just a plain green leaf you'd walk past on the way to somewhere else. I bit into it and got green mango, sharp and sour, like the unripe ones we dip in asam boi back home. The stem was even stronger. I stood there trying to work out what I'd do with it behind a bar and I honestly had no idea.

That's when it hit me how little of this we normally see. In Kuala Lumpur, my ingredients come from a supplier list. They arrive in boxes, named, sorted and priced. Someone else has decided they're worth using before I even touch them. Walking through Singa Perang, nobody had made that decision yet. You had to taste, smell and figure it out yourself.

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The Mystery Ingredient Box

After the foraging, each bartender got a Mystery Ingredient Box. Inside was what we'd seen that day, plus other local ingredients you can find around Bali. Some were familiar, like coconut and jackfruit. Others most of us had never worked with before. They had a few hours to come up with one cocktail and one low or non-alcoholic drink, using only what was in the box.

A few hours sounds like a lot, but it isn't. In a normal bar, developing a new drink can take weeks of testing, costing and tweaking before it goes on the menu. Here, they had an afternoon, with ingredients they'd only met that morning.

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Where Does a Sago Worm Go?

Behind the bar, you can put together more than a hundred combinations without thinking much, because you already know how everything tastes. Lime for sour, sugar for sweet, Campari when you want some bitterness, soy or mushroom if a drink needs umami.

The box was a different story. Is a sago worm sweet, savoury or umami? I had no clue. Raw coffee was just as confusing. The skin of the fresh cherry is peppery, the flesh is slightly sweet, and the bean itself has hardly any flavour until it's roasted. I've worked with coffee for years and had never tasted it before it became coffee. We had to taste everything properly and some ingredients changed depending on which part you ate, how long you chewed or what you'd tried just before.

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Jackfruit as Meat, Sago Worm as Cream

So they did exactly that. Everyone kept going back to the box to taste, smell and chew, scribbling notes before going back for another bite. For the first hour, hardly anything got made. I didn't see anyone reaching for a Margarita or Whisky Sour template and adding a local ingredient on top. They started with the ingredients and worked outwards.

Fittingly, durian turned up in the mystery box of Thanesh Kumar from Backdoor Bodega, the only Malaysian in the group. Coming from Penang, home of some of the country's most famous durian, he was probably the best person to get it. He built his drink around the durian and used jackfruit as a sort of fake meat. To tone the durian down, he added andaliman, a citrusy pepper from North Sumatra that leaves a slight numbing tingle. If you've ever tried putting durian in a drink, you'll know it takes over everything very quickly, so using andaliman to rein it in was a clever move.

Ron Cruz from Fat Cat in Manila had sago worm as his main ingredient, blending it with coconut, vanilla, egg yolk and rum. The result was thick, rich and creamy, more like a dessert than a cocktail, and nobody would guess what went into it.

None of these drinks would have happened without that morning's foraging. Seeing where the ingredients grew and tasting them fresh gave the bartenders something to work from that a supplier list never could.

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Why Locavore?

If you're not familiar with the name, Locavore is one of the most important restaurants Bali has produced. Chefs Eelke Plasmeijer and Ray Adriansyah opened the original in Ubud and spent over a decade building a tasting menu entirely around Indonesian produce, at a time when most fine dining on the island was still importing almost everything. The restaurant was known as one of the most sustainable in Asia and was a regular on the Asia's 50 Best list.

The same group is also behind The Night Rooster, the cocktail bar that hosted this programme. The bar and the kitchen share the same thinking and Into The Wild Club is basically that thinking applied to bartenders.

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The weekend wrapped up with the mystery-ingredient bar takeover at Locavore NXT with all seven bartenders serving the drinks they'd developed from the mystery boxes. I'll admit I wondered how the crowd would react to a menu with sago worm and durian on it. I needn't have worried. By the end of the night, every drink had sold out.

I left Bali with a notebook full of ingredients I'd never heard of before that weekend. The chem chem leaf was one, andaliman another, plus plenty of others I'm still trying to figure out how to use. Watching the seven of them work also reminded me why I got into bartending in the first place. A leaf, a worm, a fruit most people would toss out, any of it can end up in a glass if you spend enough time with it.

It also made me notice how much of my own work runs on autopilot. I've been using the same builds, the same suppliers and the same flavour directions for years. A bar needs that consistency to survive a busy Friday night. Still, it's easy to forget that every ingredient we use was once something nobody knew what to do with.

For more information about Into The Wild, visit Into The Wild Club